On Monday, October 5, the working sessions of the Arab Feminism(s) conference kicked off at 9:30am with a first panel on “New Directions for Arab Feminist Thought – Part 1”. In my opinion, the two most interesting papers in this panel were those of Najla Hemadeh and Zeina Zaatari, the first for being anti-feminist and the second for actually being feminist.
Najla Hemadeh, professor at several Lebanese universities, started by talking about how knowledge about women has always been distorted, giving the example of Aristotle who claimed that men have more teeth than women. She also claimed that Western feminists have contributed to the ruining of the image of femininity by wearing manly clothes and cutting their hair short, such as Simone de Beauvoir who said “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
She then moved to talking about the differences between men and women, making a distinction I have not heard since I was 13: that of biological and social differences. Hemadeh confidently explained what the world’s greatest scientists still fail to explain: the human brain.
She made the differentiation between how men and women use different areas of their brain. After many interesting comments, Najla Hemadeh announced that the Arab view towards women is not demeaning at all – unlike the Western view. The Arab view dignifies women and their intelligence to a degree of fearing them. That is our real problem: we are feared.
Hemadeh’s conclusion does not fail your expectations. She ends her paper saying that we should learn from the Western feminists’ accomplishments in women’s rights, while understanding that our situation is different and maintaining that the role of women in Arab societies is linked to motherhood.
A very different paper came next. Zeina Zaatari spoke of “An Arab Feminist Renaissance: Possibilities and Requirements,” one that meets on common ground. The essence of her movement is change of the current power relations that give privilege to the older, the richer, the male.
Zaatari criticized Arab women who demand equal rights by linking them to other issues in family and society or by talking about women as wives, mothers and daughters. “It is as if we can’t fight for women’s rights for the own sake of fighting for women’s rights,” she said. “We should not put ourselves on the defensive side; that is the difference between the feminist movement and the women’s movement. The Feminist movement does not excuse or justify itself.” Despite time constraints, Zaatari insisted on getting to the more controversial part of her paper, where she talked about sexual rights of women, an issue that most of the women in the room opposed. She criticized the women’s movement for not talking about how sexual relationships are organized within the institution of marriage. She called upon all activists and researchers to take on the issue of women’s relationship to their bodies and the rights of sexual minorities. She gave the example of someone who told her that women suffering poverty in Palestinian camps had more important issues than sexual rights. “As if those women don’t have sex,” Zeina retorted, “as if they don’t need awareness on sexual pleasure, as if they are not raped under the excuse of marital duty, as if they shouldn’t get to decide whether they want to have kids or not, as if some of them do not fall in love with the female neighbor thus believing they’ve been possessed by the devil.”
Zaatari ended her talk by saying that the current women’s movement leaves behind sexual rights and rights of minorities and does not work on creating a healthy relationship between women and their bodies. Those are all issues that must be included in the feminist movement.
Contributed by Rania Ignatios
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